This invention relates generally to a computer network-based system and more particularly to a system and method for providing information exchange to members of a partnership on a variety of issues.
For partnerships having numerous partners located in multiple places worldwide, information exchange on a timely basis for partnership related business issues is a major challenge. Most partnership information exchange is paper-driven, therefore resolving issues is sometimes difficult in such business arrangements. Another challenge simply involves the time spent in assembling, formatting and submitting the information to be exchanged. Sometimes after such a lengthy gathering process, the information compiled is already outdated. In addition, much of the manual labor involved is repetitive. As with any paper driven process, archiving is another issue to be dealt with.
Electronic information exchange has dealt with these problems to some extent, however in diverse partnerships, legacy formatting issues and differences in procedures have left much of the inefficiencies unaffected, for example, time expended manually in gathering the information and possibly converting the information into a different format. Overall, both the traditional paper methods and known electronic methods can be very frustrating and may not necessarily facilitate resolving partnership information exchange issues.
It would be desirable to facilitate partnership information exchange by providing a system that allows real-time access to partnership business information, and facilitates updates to the information, while eliminating the inefficiencies of known systems.
The invention provides an integrated approach to providing members of a partnership with information and feedback regarding the business. The method incorporated into the web-based system includes restricting database access only to authorized users within the partnership, providing forms stored within a server as web pages for the insertion updated business data, uploading business data updates intended for use by other authorized users within the partnership to the server for storage in the database, formatting the business data for display using web pages stored within server, and downloading and displaying the web pages to authorized users.